Years in development, Ridley Scott’s Aliens prequel Prometheus flaunts many roots, from epic themes sucked out of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the inevitable, awful ick-with-teeth (Aliens and its progeny). There is a dull nod ...

As Queen Ravenna, the vicious usurper in Snow White and the Huntsman, Charlize Theron looks so fabulous that her Oscar-winner, Aileen Wuornos in Monster, seems almost another species. An empress of narcissism, Ravenna insists on ...

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom opens with Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” The tactic, like the music, is inspired. The kids of the Bishop family listen to the vinyl LP, and their imaginations ...

Through his career, François Cluzet has been chased by a resemblance to Dustin Hoffman. In a restrained French way, he might be as talented. I would rather view again his quadriplegic Philippe in The Intouchables ...

Jack Black, a likeable actor, simply had to play the most likeable man in Carthage, Texas. He is Bernhardt Tiede II, currently in prison yet still loved in Carthage for having been a funeral director ...

Early reviews have argued that director Mary Harron has fallen below her previous level (American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page) with The Moth Diaries. They might better have emphasized the intelligent skill that Harron, who ...

Director Tim Burton might never equal his early pinnacle Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, with its tight budget and its design in splendid sync with weird little Pee-wee Herman. Burton came close with Beetlejuice and Ed Wood, ...

The pieces of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fit together enjoyably. Here is something for those who love Downton Abbey (and Upstairs Downstairs) and something for those who love Slumdog Millionaire. Add elements of Merchant ...

No doubt it is better to be a young, pretty prostitute for moneyed Parisians than, say, an aging gutter slut in Tampico. But the human complications are not much reduced. Facing those complications in Elles, ...

Emily Blunt is so sanely appealing that her honest touches rescue parts of The Five-Year Engagement, but not the movie. What could? Director Nicholas Stoller wrote it with actor Jason Segel, who gave himself a ...

My most surreal preview was in December, 1997. I sat alone in San Diego’s single-screen Cinema 21 in Mission Valley, surrounded by what seemed like 10,000 empty seats. The vast Titanic rolled over me, on ...

’Tis a pity he’s a bore. That idea might creep up as you view the creepy Shakespearean “hero” of Coriolanus. Ralph Fiennes directed and stars as Rome’s General Caius Martius Coriolanus. A killing machine who ...

The first era of 3-D gave us flying lances and tomahawks, but the thrill (like the fad) faded. The process was revived creatively by Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. A ...

Another buzz-kill week at the movies: wolves, cancer, thoughts of Oscar. Oy vey (yes, let us prepare for the Jewish film festival). Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, about men pursued by Alaskan wolves, will not be ...

Hollywood spends too much time and money turning tragedies into buckets of custard. In The Descendants, a coma crisis is sweetened by Hawaiian scenery and George Clooney’s breeze-along charm. In We Bought a Zoo, the ...

Glad tidings, of coming holiday gifts: “I won’t talk!” silently mouths an actor in the silent movie being made inside The Artist, a film that is itself almost entirely silent in speech. Soon after, a ...

As the year starts to fade, we find time for some three-star entertainments: Martin Scorsese, our national auteur and No. 1 movie fan, converts his status into both commercial and emotional terms with Hugo. Without ...

Marilyn Monroe in England, Werner Herzog in Texas, George Clooney in Hawaii, Serge Gainsbourg in Paris (and next week, Scorsese’s Hugo in Paris). Off we go: Hardly anyone recalls that Marilyn Monroe won major French ...

Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar needs a livelier title. May I suggest Anal-Retention Serenade? In this movie, a young American discovers his anti-Red obsession by finding Bolshevik propaganda flyers on the street and is soon proudly ...

William Shakespeare is virtually illiterate in Anonymous, but since the movie seems to have been made for (and by) illiterates, why worry? The film is mainly about Edward de Vere, the highly educated, modestly talented ...

As Dr. Robert Ledgard in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, Antonio Banderas has a John Boehner tan and a rather Republican attitude (cut, cut, cut). Experimenting in his luxurious home surgery near Toledo, ...

We drive through a plague, past dear Mozart, and on to pretty Coronado: Ryan Gosling, once a Mouseketeer on TV, will never be one of the big, terse dominators (Mitchum, Marvin, Bronson, Eastwood). But his ...

The summer harvest, mid-August — we reap what we can: Rachel Weisz was excellent in Agora, one of the few movies to deal smartly with the cultural collapse of classical antiquity. Not many Americans paid ...

I regret missing A Little Help, which last fall won Best Narrative Feature at downtown’s San Diego Film Festival. Still, a pleasure deferred is not always lost, and the revelation of the picture is Jenna ...

Piping from countless multiplexes, the siren of summer buzz calls us to mull Green Lantern’s grosses, to decipher the Jim Carrey–comeback potential of Mr. Popper’s Penguins, to dwell on the Comic-Con dimensions of Transformers: Dark ...

Clutching a chainsaw, we visit a big, beautiful tree: The Tree of Life In 38 years, Terrence Malick has directed only five feature films. Even Stanley Kubrick, the Great Oz of take-it-slow cinema, achieved eight ...

We sail into the Sargasso Sea of summer, where movie sequels trawl for box-office kelp. But then, off to Paris! Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Having taken in way over two billion, even ...